The Great Charade

Extract from The New Rulers of the
World by John Pilger (Macmillan, Australia, 2002), [5
September 2002]

It is nearly one year since September 11, and still the great charade
plays on. Having appropriated our shocked and humane response to that
momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language
into a paean of cliches and lies about the war on terrorism -
when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them.

The fanatics who attacked the U.S. came mostly from Saudi Arabia, the
spiritual home of al-Qaeda and paymaster of the Taliban, but no bombs
fell on that oil-rich protectorate of the U.S. According to a U.S.
study, 5000 civilians were bombed to death in stricken, impoverished
Afghanistan, where not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been
caught, or to anyone's knowledge, killed. Osama bin Laden got
clean away, as did the Taliban ruler Mullah Omar.

After this stunning victory, hundreds of prisoners, including
the Australian David Hicks, were shipped to a concentration camp at a
U.S. naval base in Cuba where they have been held against all conventions
of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has
been produced. In the United States, more than 1000 people of Muslim
background have disappeared; none has been charged. The
Patriot

Act, undermining the Bill of Rights, has been rushed through Congress
without debate. The FBI now has the power to go into libraries and
find out who is reading what.

Meanwhile, the British and Australian governments made fools of their
soldiers by insisting they follow U.S. orders and pursue uncooperative
Afghan tribesmen opposed to this or that favoured warlord. This is
what British squaddies in puttees and pith helmets did over a century
ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one
of the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a
great game for the domination of the world.

There is no war on terrorism. It is the great game sped up, and now
more dangerous than ever, due to the rampant nature of world's
only hyperpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.

Having delivered the Palestinians into the arms of Ariel Sharon, the
Christian Right hypocrites aiding the plutocracy in Washington now
turn their priorities to manufacturing more bombs and missiles to hurl
at the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need
reminding, this is a nation held hostage to U.S.-led sanctions every
bit as barbaric as their dictator. Iraq has the world's second
greatest proven reserves of oil - the reason for the attack is that
the United States want another, less uppity thug to hand it over.

The Pentagon told former president Bill Clinton that an all-out attack
on Iraq would kill at least 10,000 civilians. To justify a
slaughter of this magnitude, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic
have been used as conduits for rumours and lies in a sustained
propaganda campaign. These ranged from allegations about an Iraqi
connection with anthrax attacks in the U.S. to a link between John
Doe Number 2 at the Oklahoma City bombing and the Iraqi Republican
Guard. Both have been discredited.

The great charade is imperialism's return journey to
respectability.

As the historian Frank Furedi reminds us in 'The New Ideology of
Imperialism' it is not long ago that the moral claims of
imperialism were seldom questioned in the West: Imperialism and the
global expansion of the Western powers were represented in
unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human
civilisation. The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism,
with all its ideas of racial and cultural superiority, was imperialism
too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best
Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Today, the
preferred euphemism is globalisation; or if an adjective is
required, global village.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, a new opportunity arose. The economic
and political crisis in the developing world, largely the result of
post-colonialism, such as the blood-letting in the Middle East and the
destruction of commodity markets in Africa, served as retrospective
justification for imperialism. Although that word remains unspeakable,
the Western intelligentsia, conservatives and liberals alike, boldly
echo the preferred euphemism, globalisation.

>From U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, an ally of elitists who
want to subdue tribal societies, to impeccably liberal commentators,
the new imperialists share a concept whose true meaning relies on a
comparison with those who are uncivilised, inferior and might
challenge the globalist values of the West.

The great divisions opening up between the rich and poor are reduced
to platitudes of how best we can deal with them - an
attitude expressed in the return of elitism and racism towards
indigenous and tribal peoples, and led aggressively by the World Bank
and I.M.F.

There are many blueprints for the new imperialism, but none as cogent
as that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to several U.S. presidents
and one of the most influential gurus in Washington, whose 1997 book
is said to have biblical authority among the George W. Bush gang and
its endless war intelligentsia. In 'The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives' Brzezinski
writes: Ever since the continents started interacting politically,
some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.

The key to controlling this vast area of the world is Central Asia.

Dominance of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan
ensures not only new sources of energy and mineral wealth but guard
posts over U.S. control of the oil of the Persian Gulf. What is
most important to the history of the world? asked
Brzezinski. The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some
stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe ...? The
stirred-up Muslims replied on September 11 last year.

Nation states must be incorporated into the global order, says
Brzezinski: To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the
more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of
imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security
dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and
protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

Brzezinski is not from the lunar right. He is as mainstream as Bush.

He was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who in
1979 persuaded Carter to sign a secret executive order funding a new
Islamic terrorist movement, the Mujihadeen, which the CIA trained in
Pakistan and Virginia, and from which emerged Osama bin Laden,
al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Brzezinski's followers include John
Negroponte, the mastermind of U.S. terror in Central America under
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, now Bush's ambassador to the United
Nations. It was Negroponte who first warned the world, after September
11, that the U.S. planned to attack any country it wished.

For those in thrall to, or neutered by, the supercult of the U.S, the
most salient truths remain taboos. Perhaps the most important taboo is
the longevity of the U.S. as both a terrorist state and a haven for
terrorists. That the U.S. is the only state on record to have been
condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in
Nicaragua) or to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on
governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.

In the war against terrorism, said Bush, we're going to
hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it
takes.

Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are
given training and sanctuary in the U.S. than anywhere in the world.

They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and
assorted international criminals. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's
henchman an apologist at the U.N, lives in Mount Vernon, New York.

General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious
prisons, is wanted by Iran, but is an honoured guest in the U.S.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently
governed by the President's brother, Jeb. General Jose Guillermo
Garcia has lived in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El
Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads closely
linked to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper
Avril, while dictator of Haiti, liked to display bloodied victims of
his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to
Florida by the U.S. government. In his book Rogue State, former senior
State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial
of three anti-Castro terrorists who had hijacked a plane to Miami at
knifepoint: Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from
Cuba to testify against the men, the judge simply told the jurors the
man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before
acquitting the defendants.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens
compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort
Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the
Americas, it trained 60,000 Latin American soldiers, policemen,
paramilitaries and intelligence agents in terrorism.

In 1993, the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army
officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war:
two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the
school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three
principal concentration camps. In 1996, the U.S. government was forced
under the Freedom of Information Act to release copies of the
school's training manuals. For aspiring terrorists, these
recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of
witnesses' relatives.

The irony is that the U.S. is also the home of some of history's
greatest human rights movements, such as the 1960s epic campaign for
civil rights.

While I was in the U.S. earlier this year, it seemed the stirring had
begun again. Almost 100 of the most distinguished names in literature,
art, journalism and education penned to their compatriots and the
world a statement called 'Not In Our Name' published this June
in the Herald and other newspapers. The signatories state that their
government has declared a war without limit and instituted stark
new measures of repression. They also criticise the media for
failing to challenge the direction the government has taken. They
include the musicians Laurie Anderson and Mos Def, the actors Ossie
Davis and Ed Asner, the writers Alice Walker, Russell Banks, Barbara
Kingsolver and Grace Paley, and the playwrights Eve Ensler and Tony
Kushner. Martin Luther King III, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, Edward
Said and Rabbi Michael Lerner have added their names, making this the
widest ranging group of opponents of government policy since September
11.